Monday, September 26, 2011

Banned Books

I love lists and encouraging people to read banned books. Or any books. But especially the ones that people have said should be banned from schools because that's how you know those are the good ones. I got this list from Bev at My Reader's Block who found it on one blog, who got it from another blog and on and on back until it came from a list posted on Books and Quilts which has a great video about why you should read banned books.

This is said to be a list of the top 110 banned books of all times but since I don't actually have the source for that list or claim, I'm going to just say here is a list of (probably) banned books. The ones I've read all of are bolded and the ones I've read part of is italicized.

#1 The Bible
#2 Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain
#3 Don Quixote by Miguel de Cervantes
#4 The Koran
#5 Arabian Nights
#6 Tom Sawyer by Mark Twain
#7 Gulliver’s Travels by Jonathan Swift
#8 Canterbury Tales by Geoffrey Chaucer
#9 The Scarlet Letter by Nathaniel Hawthorne
#10 Leaves of Grass by Walt Whitman
#11 The Prince by Niccolo Machiavelli
#12 Uncle Tom’s Cabin by Harriet Beecher Stowe
#13 Diary of a Young Girl by Anne Frank
#14 Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert
#15 Oliver Twist by Charles Dickens
#16 Les Miserables by Victor Hugo
#17 Dracula by Bram Stoker
#18 Autobiography by Benjamin Franklin
#19 Tom Jones by Henry Fielding
#20 Essays by Michel de Montaigne
#21 Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck
#22 History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire by Edward Gibbon
#23 Tess of the D’Urbervilles by Thomas Hardy
#24 Origin of Species by Charles Darwin
#25 Ulysses by James Joyce
#26 Decameron by Giovanni Boccaccio
#27 Animal Farm by George Orwell
#28 Nineteen Eighty-Four by George Orwell
#29 Candide by Voltaire
#30 To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee

#31 Analects by Confucius
#32 Dubliners by James Joyce
#33 Of Mice and Men by John Steinbeck
#34 Farewell to Arms by Ernest Hemingway
#35 Red and the Black by Stendhal
#36 Das Capital by Karl Marx
#37 Flowers of Evil by Charles Baudelaire
#38 The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
#39 Lady Chatterley’s Lover by D. H. Lawrence
#40 Brave New World by Aldous Huxley
#41 Sister Carrie by Theodore Dreiser
#42 Gone with the Wind by Margaret Mitchell
#43 Jungle by Upton Sinclair
#44 All Quiet on the Western Front by Erich Maria Remarque
#45 Communist Manifesto by Karl Marx
#46 Lord of the Flies by William Golding
#47 Diary by Samuel Pepys
#48 Sun Also Rises by Ernest Hemingway
"#49 Jude the Obscure by Thomas Hardy"
#50 Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury
#51 Doctor Zhivago by Boris Pasternak
#52 Critique of Pure Reason by Immanuel Kant
#53 One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest by Ken Kesey
#54 Praise of Folly by Desiderius Erasmu
#55 Catch-22 by Joseph Heller
#56 Autobiography of Malcolm X by Malcolm X
#57 The Color Purple by Alice Walker
#59 Essay Concerning Human Understanding by John Locke
#60 The Bluest Eye by Toni Morrison
#61 Moll Flanders by Daniel Defoe
#62 One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
#63 East of Eden by John Steinbeck
#64 Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison
#65 I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings by Maya Angelou
#66 Confessions by Jean Jacques Rousseau
#67 Gargantua and Pantagruel by Francois Rabelais
#68 Leviathan by Thomas Hobbes
#69 The Talmud
#70 Social Contract by Jean Jacques Rousseau
#71 Bridge to Terabithia by Katherine Paterson
#72 Women in Love by D. H. Lawrence
#73 American Tragedy by Theodore Dreiser
#74 Mein Kampf by Adolf Hitler
#75 Separate Peace by John Knowles
#76 The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath
#77 The Red Pony by John Steinbeck

#78 Popol Vuh
#79 Affluent Society by John Kenneth Galbraith
#80 Satyricon by Petronius
#81 James and the Giant Peach by Roald Dahl
#82 Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov
#83 Black Boy by Richard Wright
#84 Spirit of the Laws by Charles de Secondat Baron de Montesquieu
#85 Slaughterhouse Five by Kurt Vonnegut
#86 Julie of the Wolves by Jean Craighead George
#87 Metaphysics by Aristotle
#88 Little House on the Prairie by Laura Ingalls Wilder
#89 Institutes of the Christian Religion by Jean Calvin
#90 Steppenwolf by Hermann Hesse
#91 The Power and the Glory by Graham Greene
#92 Sanctuary by William Faulkner
#93 As I Lay Dying by William Faulkner
#94 Black Like Me by John Howard Griffin
#95 Sylvester and the Magic Pebble by William Steig
#96 Sorrows of Young Werther by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
#97 General Introduction to Psychoanalysis by Sigmund Freud
#98 The Handmaid’s Tale by Margaret Atwood
#99 Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee by Dee Alexander Brown
#100 Clockwork Orange by Anthony Burgess
#101 Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman by Ernest J. Gaines
#102 Emile Jean by Jacques Rousseau
#103 Nana by Emile Zola
#104 The Chocolate War by Robert Cormier
#105 Go Tell It on the Mountain by James Baldwin
#106 Gulag Archipelago by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
#107 Stranger in a Strange Land by Robert A. Heinlein
#108 The Day No Pigs Would Die by Robert Peck
#109 Ox-Bow Incident by Walter Van Tilburg Clark
#110 Flowers for Algernon by Daniel Keyes

26 read, 9 partially read. How's your list stack up?

Comments (20)

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Hah! I got 26, but some different ones. I'm kind of confused about James and the Giant Peach being on there. What subversive message was Roald Dahl trying to beam into our brains with his nefarious words?
6 replies · active 702 weeks ago
I found this post from Bookslut that outlines why James and the Giant Peach was banned: http://www.bookslut.com/banned_bookslut/2003_12_0...
"The Times of London reported that James and the Giant Peach was once banned in a Wisconsin town because a reference to Spider licking her lips could be "taken in two ways, including sexual.""

Fantastic.
You rule for finding this link cos I was wondering the same thing when I saw this on the list.
26 is clearly the awesome number. And also (apparently) it's that sexy spider that parents can't handle.
I plan on protecting my children from sexy spiders at all costs.
You should keep them away from Charlotte's Web too. Charlotte could be quite a minx.
Oooh, I so need to steal this list for my blog if you have no objections- I haven't read any banned books to review or anything, so this is perfect :). I just can't comprehend books still being banned like in the now-times, and book burnings make me want to cry. Also, yeah, what's with James and the Giant Peach being banned?! And all those lovely Steinbeck books *sniff*
1 reply · active 702 weeks ago
Of course! Steal away. I got it from someone else :)

Book burnings really hurt my head. I mean, really? You're going to burn them? When people want books banned from libraries I feel like there's still a chance to reason with them. When they want to burn books, then that's when you just back away slowly and don't make any sudden movements.
I've read about 23 of these - not too bad!
1 reply · active 702 weeks ago
Very respectable number!
I have 19, though I've started a lot of these or have them in a TBR pile. At first I was surprised by Little House on the Prairie, but it could have been the way Native Americans are portrayed. I think Laura sees walking by, and when she spots a baby she says, "I want it!" That could be offensive, but not banworthy. I'm curious about Sherlock Holmes, too.
1 reply · active 702 weeks ago
I wish I knew the reasons for all of the banned selections. I can't say I've read Little House on the Prairie so perhaps it's full of debauchery but it seems like such an innocent series.
It's such a great list, isn't it? I've read 20 of these and have another 20 waiting on my TBR shelf.
1 reply · active 702 weeks ago
Very nice both for the ones you've already read and the ones you plan to read. I need to get a few more of these added to my TBR list.
Wow I got 23 - more than I expected.
1 reply · active 702 weeks ago
Very nice. I have to say, looking over the list again, I read a lot of these in school so kudos to my school system for not banning these. Or any books, to the best of my knowledge.
Well, based upon the books on the list that you've read, or read portions of, your brain must be mush by now, and you must be completely and hopelessly corrupted--LOL! Truly hard to imagine any of those works having been banned (or, amazingly enough, still being banned!). It is scary how some segments of how societies around the world believe that banning books/ideas is an effective way to control how people think and act. Great post! Cheers! Chris
1 reply · active 702 weeks ago
Oh yes, I've been completely corrupted. That's what I don't understand: what do book banners hope to accomplish with their book banning tirades? I mean, I get the initial idea but since that has proven to not work over and over again, why are books still banned?

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